UPDATE
Does hearing about this make you excited for the franchise’s return? Let us know below!
ORIGINAL STORY
When it comes to longstanding video game franchises, there is a fine line to walk between doing something innovative to “shake things up” and then trying to “stay true to what made the past games great.” Some teams walk that line well, and others don’t. With Ubisoft, they’ve been on both sides of that equation with numerous franchises they own. But with Prince of Persia The Lost Crown, the game has received plenty of praise from critics because it takes what worked in previous Ubisoft titles and then changes things to make it feel “fresh enough” to bring in new players.
Xbox sat down with Prince of Persia The Lost Crown Game Director Mounir Radi and asked about the games that helped inspired the new title. It might surprise you to learn that the team at Ubisoft Montpellier was the ones behind the last mainline title with Rayman over a decade again, and Radi admitted that when it came to platforming, they took inspiration from Rayman:
“For the platforming aspect, yes; not for the combat. Those two things are quite different, but for the platforming aspect, the flow, we are talking about how to convey the weight of your character and the musicality.”
To establish that “flow,” the team decided to turn its main character, Sargon, into a regular capsule. They then used that stand-in model to try to get the game’s feel right before they did anything with the main model and its animations. To them, this helped them “nail the feel” without having to worry about missing something by just interjecting the final game model and then rolling with it:
“We took a lot of time after that to try to figure out how to convey Sargon’s weight, and to think about his physicality. The weight, for me, is the whole thing, and we took a lot of time figuring out the lengths of specific animations to convey it – sometimes it was just about one frame. One frame, I swear it!”
Even after getting that feeling down, the team then turned to combat and exploration. They wanted the game to stand on its own two feet, which meant doing things that were more about “experimentation” than doing what other Metroidvania titles have previously done. Yes, there are plenty of references to that genre, but you’ll have plenty of options for handling things within Ubisoft’s newest game.
A game, by the way, that launches tomorrow on console and PC!
